How Trump is testing the Supreme Court’s limits

With a divided Congress that long ago ceded much of its responsibility to the executive branch and an energetic president eager to take advantage of that, litigants often look to the least democratic branch to police the boundaries of government power — the federal courts. Under those current circumstances, the nation’s highest court now carries an outsized burden in deciding how much authority presidents can wield.

If recent years are an indication of where the U.S. Supreme Court stands, majorities of the nine justices have shown a greater skepticism toward broad assertions of power by the executive branch. In a 2022 case involving the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement of the Clean Air Act, the court held that Congress must “speak clearly” before the justices let lawmakers